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There are only so many hours in a day and yet our work never seems to end. How can we better extend our reach and increase awareness of Extension?

For almost three years we have been using technology to enhance our efforts to inform and interact with the publics we serve. We drive web travelers to this very blog using popular social networking tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Together, these tools and the blog link users to our other web-based content that includes podcasts, videos, and a variety of downloadable materials.

In days past, we assembled a quarterly newsletter that required formatting, copying, and then hard copy distribution. With the advent of email, that approach gave way to an electronic PDF version that could be sent to an email list. The web enabled us to post the PDF but who would actually go there to read it?

Today, we are reaching literally thousands of people, many of whom are connecting with us for the very first time. Not only are they able to acquire the specific content that is of interest to them, we are also now able to interact in ways we could not ever before.

The entire staff plays a creative role which has built a real sense of teamwork. And knowing we are extending our reach and increasing awareness of Extension has been very motivating as well!

To learn more about our approach, please feel free to contact me or any of the CD team members.

To see how it could work for you, take the opportunity to investigate some of the recent posts, categories or tags that interest you on the left side of your screen. Notice how you can share the content you like with others, interact with the author and others who have an interest in the topic, and find additional information linked to the post. Enjoy!!

Greg Davis is the Assistant Director for OSU Extension, Community Development.

Welcome to an election year. As bad as the television ads are, I feel even more inundated with political messaging on Facebook. Although I rarely watch television these days, political messaging is seemingly everywhere during an election year and it is not going to let up between now and November. One of the staples of the political messaging tool-kit is the poll.

Polls are, among other things, an attempt to record people’s opinions. They can be done a number of different ways, and some of them are more accurate than others. One of the biggest differences between a poll and a survey is in the way the sample, or the group of people who are asked the questions, are found. Surveys are often used for longer term projects, and therefore require a very careful statistical analysis of the group of people you ask your questions. Polls, on the other hand, are designed to ask groups of people the same question or two and crunch the numbers quickly so that you can measure change over even a short period of time. That makes them ideal to measure who is favored to win an election. Usually, election polls are expected to be accurate within a three percent margin of error.

So what went wrong in Michigan’s presidential primary last March? There, Clinton was favored to win by a large margin of between 11 and 37 points depending on the poll. Instead, Sanders won. Not by much, but by enough to make people question the veracity of polls in general.

The problem with polls is who is getting asked the questions. Let’s go back to the Michigan example. Reputable polling companies (Gallup being the best known) follows federal law, which stipulates that only landline phones can be called with the poll questions. That law is rooted in the technology and cellular plans of the nineties when people only got a few minutes of cell phone calls a month and did not want to spend them on political polls! But what worked in the 1990s and early 2000s does not work in 2016 when many people gave up landlines for unlimited cellphone talk time. Restricting polling to landlines means that pollsters are going to be literally unable to reach a significant chunk of the population.

Fortunately for those conducting research, this is changing. In fact, more than a third of households no longer have landlines. But part of what makes this so skewed is which households those are. In a 2013 study by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 61% of rental homes do not have landline phones and 45% of homes with children do not have landlines. By not polling people who only have cellphones, you are automatically skewing your data by not reaching a proportional number of younger people, families with children, or those who rent. All of these are demographic groups who were more likely to vote for Sanders in the primary.

The second problem with the Michigan Poll was also related to who was asked. The poll in question was targeted to registered Democrats. While that sounds fine in theory, the fact of the matter is that a lot of people are registered with a political party and yet haven’t voted in the last election for a variety of reasons. Changing party registration can happen right at the poll, so getting a list of registered voters or registered members of a party does not mean that they are likely to vote in any given election, even a presidential primary. A better solution is to instead look at recent voters, people who voted in the last election, or in two of the last four elections. This way you hopefully manage to avoid the people who are registered, but don’t bother to go to the polls.

So, there you have it. Some of the concerns about the numbers you see in polls and why they might not reflect what actually happens when people vote. Keep these in mind as you hear the latest polling data leading up to November 8th. And remember, a poll or a survey’s “generalizability” is only as good as the sample. Or as is so often the case, you get out what you put in!

Happy Polling!

Laura Fuller is a County Extension Educator (Noble County & Buckeye Hills EERA).

“Local Foods”… What does this really mean to residents of Ohio? As Ohioans, it seems we use words like these on a daily basis. But, do we really understand the need? Local Foods can aid in feeding a growing global population, projected to be 9 billion by 2050. We must produce more food in the next 50 years than has been produced in the past 10,000 years combined, all while tillable land is becoming less available.

In our ever-changing world, we want the freshest product available with the most economic value. Often, the solution is to meet local producers and buy directly from them. This helps the consumer to not only enjoy local food, but also learn of the economic, nutritional, and social benefits of buying local. Freshness is one of the benefits of Local Foods adding to the experience of the personal connection between growers and producers. According to the 2012 USDA Agricultural Census, Ohio ranks among the top ten states for direct sales to consumers represented by a wide variety of food products. Two resources available in Ohio to aid in the challenge of linking the producer and consumer are: Market Maker and Ohio Proud.

Many people are searching for ways to improve their quality of life by eating local food. Consumers now wish to become the producer, not only in the produce sector, but in animal agriculture. This enables the consumer to gain an intimate knowledge of the food source in a hands-on environment. From this there has been an up-turn in economic development strategies to market locally produced foods. Interest groups in many communities aim to increase the accessibility to items for both wholesale and retail customers. These groups are sometimes lacking one essential component… research-based information. OSU Extension is in a position to educate these individuals in raising and growing their own food, as well as in harvesting and storing their food products. This is an excellent opportunity for cross-program collaboration within our system.

In Clermont County, we are especially interested in combining efforts to produce a cohesive change. There are many tools available to aid in this effort. So, contact your local Extension office and get involved in the local foods mission. Be a part of feeding the world today.

Since the financial crisis of 2008, the national debts of many nations throughout the world have skyrocketed. Even though the crisis started in the private sector, the balance sheets of national governments quickly turned negative because of reduced tax revenues and a tendency for governments to “bail out” troubled private sector institutions (mainly banks) that were deemed “too big to fail.” Of all the countries in the world, the one that has received the most scrutiny for a rapid increase in its national debt has been Greece. Most Americans are at least somewhat aware that Greece itself has been “bailed out” by the European Union several times since 2010 because it faced insolvency – a situation where it literally could not service its debt or even pay its operating expenses. These bailouts have come with a lot of tight strings attached that have caused the unemployment rate to rise to 27% and nearly half of all Greek households to fall into poverty. Other countries that have had serious national debt/solvency issues include Ireland, Spain and Portugal.

In the United States, both the Bush and the Obama administrations took actions to fight the crisis in 2008 and 2009. These actions resulted in large increases in America’s national debt also. In early 2008, the Bush administration succeeded in getting tax rebates to households and then a few months later agreed with Congress on the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Together, these initiatives added nearly $1 trillion to the national debt. Soon after he took office, President Obama signed the stimulus package (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) that was nearly $800 billion added to the debt on top of that.

These actions, which were necessary to prevent the American economy from falling from recession into depression, came under criticism from certain elements in the American political economy. Moreover, annual budget deficits since 2010 have pushed the national debt up to $18 trillion. The critics argued that the influx of all these moneys into the economy would cause hyperinflation and that the resulting national debt would create an insolvency problem in the United States like the one in Greece.

These critics have been wrong on both accounts. First, the inflation rate since 2008 has been the lowest for any seven year period in the post-World War II era. Obviously, the critics who warned of inflation could not possibly have been more wrong about the results. Second, the comparisons with Greece about debt and insolvency are completely inappropriate because Greece is a member of a monetary union and does not issue its own currency. Greece’s debt is denominated in a currency over which it has no control (the Euro). US debt on the other hand is denominated in a currency that only it can issue (the dollar). The difference between these two positions cannot be overstated. What is ironic is that many of the critics who have been sounding the alarm about the US national debt also prescribe “solutions” which would tie the hands of federal policy makers, and lead to a situation where the US indeed could face the problems Greece does. These two “solutions” are: a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution and a return to the gold standard.

Related to the balanced budget amendment is the “debt ceiling.” Another constraint on what the federal government can do to help when the economy slows down, the debt ceiling was once seen as a relatively harmless rule. But in recent years, the Congress of the United States has come very close to allowing this ad hoc rule to push the American economy to the edge of a default crisis. In other words, the United States nearly defaulted on its debt, not because it could not service it, but because the Congress for a time threatened to refuse to service it. Every dollar the US government owes has been a result of spending and tax laws that the Congress itself has approved. The results of the spending and tax laws have led to an increase in the national debt. Simply choosing a number and arguing that we cannot surpass that even when the legislation for taxation and spending rates has been approved serves no useful economic function. This is because the US government can easily create the money to service the debt it owes. The same holds true for why there is no need for a balanced budget amendment at the federal level. Note that this is not the same for the states, because states do not issue their own currency. Like Greece, they must somehow get their money from taxpayers (or get bailed out by the central government) to make ends meet.

The gold standard is another inappropriate suggestion that we currently hear about today. Essentially, the gold standard robs the federal government of its ability to create money when needed to face a potential crisis. To that extent, it is essentially the equivalent of joining a monetary union like the Eurozone. The Bush tax rebates, the TARP, the stimulus program – none of these could have been adopted without the monetary authority in the US (the Federal Reserve) having the flexibility to finance them by printing money “out of thin air.” And it is because of this flexible monetary policy that the current recovery from the “Great Recession” of 2007-2009 is now in its seventh year. Saying that the United States government might run out of dollars to pay its debt is a bit like saying the scorekeeper at a basketball game might run out of points to award the teams if they keep making more baskets.

And the $18 trillion national debt? There is no need to “pay it off.” The government services the debt by paying bond holders interest. Bond holders can sell their bonds to investors, roll them over, or even sell them back to the government, which can always issue the money to pay for them. Won’t that cause inflation? Not when the economy is operating well below capacity – see paragraph 4 above. So no, the US government cannot face insolvency – unless it chooses to place upon itself counter-productive constraints that serve no useful economic purpose, or like Greece, joins a monetary union that essentially has the same effect.

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